A Spanish court has ordered the withdrawal of a mother’s custody of her one-year-old boy because she is living in the countryside in northwestern Spain, where the judge says the child won’t have “opportunities for the proper development of his personality.”
The case, reported Monday in La Voz de Galicia, has sparked outrage from a women’s rights association but has also set off reactions from politicians of different stripes across the province of Galicia, defending the values of rural life.
Judge María Belén Ureña Carazo, of the family court of Marbella, a city on the southern coast of 141,000 people, has ordered the toddler to stay with father who lives in the city rather than with his mother because she was living in “deep Galicia” where the child would lack opportunities to “grow up in a happy environment.”
Front page of La Voz de Galicia – October 25, 2021
Better in a “cosmopolitan” city?
The judge said Marbella, where the father lives, was a “cosmopolitan city” with “a good hospital” as well as “all kinds of schools” and thus provided a better environment for the child to thrive.
The mother has submitted a formal complaint to the General Council of the Judiciary that the family court magistrate had acted with “absolute contempt,” her lawyer told La Voz de Galicia.
The mother quickly accumulated support from local politicians and civic organizations. The Clara Campoamor association described the judge’s arguments as offensive, intolerable and typical of “an ignorant person who has not traveled much.”
The Xunta de Galicia, the regional government, has addressed the case, saying that any place in Galicia meets the conditions to educate a minor. The Socialist party politician Pablo Arangüena tweeted that “it would not hurt part of the judiciary to spend a summer in Galicia.”
